The
teaching of Vatican II on the question of salvation entails surprises. While
the Council holds that there is no salvation outside the Church, it exerts
itself with solicitude for those who may qualify as being “outside.” For
Vatican II, to be “outside” is to have a claim on the Church’s maternal love, which
is fulfilled when her children respond to the missionary mandate. The Council
teaches that Catholics must be prepared to confess their faith in Christ even
to the point of death (Lumen Gentium
42)including what this faith holds about the Churchand also affirms that
those without this explicit faith, and thus who would never be required to die
for it, may notwithstanding be saved.

The
Council teaches that the Church can engage in missionary activity with
confidence that she has two allies: human natureand thus nature’s Godand this
same God’s supernatural grace. The dynamisms of human nature impel all men to
seek their own fulfillment in the truth and in the good. With the help of God’s
grace working objectively through cultures and religions and secretly in
hearts, fidelity to these dynamisms becomes fidelity to God himself, Creator
and Redeemer. At the same time, human nature has been profoundly wounded by
sin, and this gives rise to negative influences that are at work in the world
and within each person’s soul. The signs of the times are always a blend of
positive indications of man’s striving for a life worthy of his dignity as
image of God, and negative signs about man’s weakness and ultimately of his
inability to attain this fully human life for himself. As a result,
missionaries will encounter people in various states ranging from being so
fully disposed to receive with joy the Good News of Jesus Christ that it could
be said of them that they are not far from the Kingdom (Mk 12:34), to being so thoroughly
blinded and hardened of heart due to slavery to sin that they respond to the
proclamation of God’s love with violent rejection and the slaying of the
missionary. Yet, even this latter situation is not a final word. Through his
martyrs’ configuration to Christ, graces of eventual conversion are won for
those whose initial response is rejection.

It
is impossible to know in advance the actual state of those who are evangelized.
Yet, even if, by hypothesis, through a private revelation God should reassure a
missionary that a person or group of persons or even the entire world were
saved, the missionary mandate would remain. This is because the missionary task has a twofold
end: “to promote the glory of God and procure the
salvation of all such men…the Church painstakingly fosters her missionary work”
(LG 16). As
important as the question about salvation is, it is inseparable from God’s
glory. Zeal for souls is not only inseparable from zeal for God’s holy Name; it
is subordinate to it, and only when it is rightly subordinated to God’s glory
can the zeal for souls unleash its full potential. The fulfillment of
Christ’s prayer that all be one in the common celebration of the Eucharist is
the greatest manifestation of the Church and thus the greatest evidence that his
love is efficacious. And this is precisely his glory. For Vatican II, mission
is ultimately realized when all are united in the praise of God in the common
celebration of the Eucharist.

God
is infinite Love, and he always has more to give. His giving and man’s
resultant enrichmenthis conversion into a fully human lifeconstitute God’s
glory. Those who have been renewed by this love participate in it and, like God
himself, they cannot rest with a reception of this love that is satisfied with
a minimum condition for salvation, even if, by hypothesis, they had divine
assurance that people were saved. The definitive explanation for indifference
about mission is a defect in missionary charity and in zeal for God’s glory. A
crisis of missionary activity manifests a crisis of missionarythat is, paschalcharity.

The
missionary crisis, then, is rooted in the lack of conversion on the part of the
Church’s members. This is why the Council’s fundamental strategy for the
reinvigoration of a languishing of missionary activity is to call the entire
Church to deeper conversion. Pope Paul VI outlined the program in his first encyclical,
Ecclesiam Suam, and on several
occasions Pope John Paul II pointed to this encyclical as the surest guide for
implementing the Council. The Church must first renew and deepen her
consciousness of her identity and mission, her vocation and place in God’s plan
of love. This consciousness, combined with humility and love of God and
neighbor, will unleash a profound conversion as the Church’s members strive to
extricate themselves more thoroughly from any influences that mitigate complete
conformity to Christ and the uninhibited flow of ardent charity. This in turn
will produce the fruits of service, apostolate, and ministry, all the manifestations
of continuing Christ’s mission of redemption. Pope Paul called this renewed
mission dialogue, and Pope John Paul II popularized it as the New
Evangelization.

In
light of this program for the reinvigoration of mission as the fruit of
conversion, one can grasp the significance of the fact that the Council’s
severest words regarding the salvation question are directed to the Catholic
faithful. “All
children of the Church should nevertheless remember that their exalted
condition results, not from their own merits, but from the grace of Christ. If
they fail to respond in thought, word, and deed to that grace, not only shall
they not be saved, but they shall be the more severely judged.” Luke 12:48 is
the biblical text enlisted to support this: “Every one to whom much is given,
of him will much be required.” The “much that is given” is the “exalted status” of being fully
incorporated into Christ’s Church.

This full
incorporation is a gift of God’s grace, received in an act of faith by which a
person has come to see that to say “Yes!” to Christ is to say “Yes!” to his
Church. Since Christ is God and God is love, this means that faith is
essentially an open-ended, unconditional “Yes!”, an entrustment to divine love, a
commitment to receive all that God desires to give. The Council framed this in
terms of the salvation question: “Whosoever, therefore, knowing that the
Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ, would refuse to enter or to
remain in it, could not be saved.”

As
a free act, this “Yes!” of faith entails an act of graced illumination of
conscience, a divinely orchestrated moment of truth, which gives form to
freedom as a vase gives shape to water. At this moment, freedom’s vocation, and
thus its fulfillment, is to conform to God’s will by seeking baptism or full
communion with the Church. In this situation, a “No!” to the Church is a “No!”
to Christ, and thus to the love and salvation he offers. In this light, the
Council’s teaching that anyone who comes to this internal realization of the link
between Christ and his Church cannot be saved means: whoever comes to a point
of realizing, with the help of God’s grace, that the fulfillment of humanity
(which is what the conscience is designed to impel towards by commanding to do
good and avoid evil) requires assenting to and living what Christ reveals about
the Church, cannot attain human fulfillment (the fundamental meaning of “salvation”)
without doing so.

Since
the first demand of conscience is that a person sincerely seek the truth, and
only under this condition does it oblige, the interior illumination of faith
about the Church is God’s merciful response to this seeking. By the working of
the grace of the light of faith, God makes known the truth that is the answer
to this search. This is an important point for two reasons. First, our age
suffers from a lamentable misunderstanding of conscience. The view is that the
default setting for conscience is one of peace, and that God’s grace is like an
unwelcome ambush, an alien invasion against which one must be on guard. In
reality, the intervention of enlightening grace is an act of liberation
perfectly corresponding to the innate dynamism of the conscience. God’s truth
sets conscience free to fulfill its mission of directing human freedom.

The
second reason why a proper understanding of conscience is important for our
subject is that Vatican II includes the act of conscience in its description of
what salvation would look like for those who have not arrived at an explicit
knowledge of Christ and who therefore cannot know what he has revealed about
the necessity of the Church for salvation: “Those also can attain to salvation
who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His
Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do
His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience” (Lumen Gentium 16). This description in
terms of “conscience” and “grace” links such people to those who by a more
perfect grace receive the gift of an enlightened conscience and by faith assent
to what Christ has revealed about the Church.

This
general affinity is anything but a reason to become complacent about mission to
such people, first because there is no possible way to know who these people
might be, and second because the thrust of a conscience enlightened by grace is
to lead to that culminating grace of discovering the full identity of God the
Creator and of God the Redeemer, and the place of the Church in his plan of
redemptive love.

Two
virtues relating to the mission to those “outside” the Church accompany the
awareness of the grace of faith acquiescing to a graced conscience: humility and
boldness (parrhesia) in missionary
charity. Knowing what he would be without grace humbles the graced person. For
the fully incorporated Catholic, this entails awareness of how he is enriched
by this full incorporation and, corresponding to this, the impoverishment of
life without it. This twofold awareness is the foundation for fulfilling the
commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself (Matt 12:31) and to love his
neighbor as Christ has loved him (Jn 13:34). This means that the missionary mandate
is not imposed from without but is written on our hearts. To desire for others
this fullness of Christ’s love regarding the Church becomes essential to the
content of one’s participation in his paschal charity, which is the soul of all
apostolic action (Lumen Gentium 33; Apostolicam Actuositatem, 3).
Their very being, their new being in Christ, impels his disciples to mission:
“The love of Christ impels us” (1 Cor 5:14).

Certainly,
any theological confusion about the nature of freedom, conscience, faith,
conversion, grace, mercy, and participation in Christ’s mission of mercy will
skew this understanding and have the effect of diminishing the sense of urgency
of mission. There are other theological misconceptions that diminish missionary
zeal and boldness.

For a
first example, a misunderstanding that holds that “dialogue” precludes the
intention of the dialoguing partner’s conversion results in an unacceptable
satisfaction with the simple exchange of information. While deepening knowledge
of one another is no doubt the immediate goal of dialogue, Vatican II calls for
a disposition of openness to conversion on the part of both dialoguing partners,
and both Paul VI and John Paul II held that conversion is dialogue’s ultimate
goal.

As a
second example, an impoverished sense of sin and a failure to see it as
rejection of God’s loveand thus as forfeiture of the
fulfillment and happiness that God intends for allundermine the sense of grace and
mercy, the very foundations of the missionary dynamism. As a third example,
fear that truth divides and by its nature creates inequalities in relationships
produces a timidity opposed to the parrhesia
of faith and makes impossible the judgment that is necessary for missionary
initiative. In the words of Paul VI: “With frank confidence the Church stands
upon the path of history and says to all: ‘Here
in my possession is what you are looking for, what you need’” (Ecclesiam Suam 95). John Paul II put it
this way:

In
proclaiming Christ to non-Christians, the missionary is convinced that, through
the working of the Spirit, there already exists in individuals and peoples an
expectation, even if an unconscious one, of knowing the truth about God, about
man, and about how we are to be set free from sin and death. The missionary’s
enthusiasm in proclaiming Christ comes from the conviction that he is
responding to that expectation (Redemptoris
Missio 45).

This awareness comes from knowing oneself as having had one’s own
expectations, one’s own desire for a fully meaningful life, fulfilled in Christ
by God’s grace. The humble and bold missionary is one who knows from experience
the liberating power of God’s truth and the transforming power of His grace,
whose own spirit bears witness with the Holy Spirit regarding this grace (Rom
8:16). The Lord’s words about the greater demand being made of those who
receive more applies especially to such as these. The missionary mandate is
addressed to all, but only those who have ears to hear it are able to respond,
and these ears become attuned to the Lord’s voice through the purifications
that come with a generous cooperation with the baptismal graces of death to
self and sin for the sake of new life in Christ. The hope of those “outside”
the Church lies in the depth of the conversion of those on the inside.

Douglas Bushman holds a licentiate in sacred theology from the University of Fribourg. He is the Blessed Pope John Paul II Chair of Theology for the New Evangelization at the Augustine Institute in Denver, and author of the adult faith enrichment program In His Image, published by Ignatius Press.

All comments posted at Catholic World Report are moderated. While vigorous debate is welcome and encouraged, please note that in the interest of maintaining a civilized and helpful level of discussion, comments containing obscene language or personal attacks—or those that are deemed by the editors to be needlessly combative and inflammatory—will not be published. Thank you.